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were numb from being clenched when I didn’t even recall doing so.
    “Rest now,” I heard Bran say. Was he stroking my cheek? His hand there felt cool and comforting. “You are past the worst. You will heal. Rest.”
    I slipped off into slumber.
    When I woke again, the first thing I realized was that the pain was gone. The memory of that agony was so intense that I burst into tears again at the thought. It wasn’t that I cried a lot. I just couldn’t help myself. What the hell had they done to me? I’d never felt anything even close to that sort of hurt.
    I reached to wipe my eyes and found I couldn’t move. My hands were restrained at my sides. I tried to twitch my legs, but those were bound as well. I couldn’t move my head to see what was holding me.
    My mouth was dry, my voice gone. What I intended to be a shout came out more like a croaking sound. Damn it, they couldn’t keep me tied up like some sort of lab rat! My breathing started to get faster, and I could hear my heart pounding.
    “You’re awake,” a voice said. I couldn’t see the speaker, but it wasn’t Bran. “Hold on just a moment.”
    Whatever was holding me down vanished. I was free. I bounded from the table where I was lying and whirled in place so quickly the movement made me dizzy. A Cymtarran was standing next to the table, tinkering with something on a console. I’d had about enough of playing lab experiment for these people.
    I hurled myself forward toward him. He turned when he heard me coming, and his eyes got very round. I was moving fast by the time I collided with him. My hand shot to his throat, and then his back was against the wall, my fingers in a tight grip.
    He was different from Bran. He wasn’t wearing armor, for one thing. His uniform was still golden colored, but it lacked the shimmering scales I’d seen on Bran and his guards. This Cymtarran’s hair was pale, almost a golden white, and his skin was etched with lines and ridges. If they were anything like humans, this one was old. A lot older than Bran, anyway. For a moment I felt a pang at the thought of grabbing an old man by his throat, but I set the thought aside just as fast. I could still remember the pain, and I had a feeling this one had something to do with it.
    “What did you do to me?” I snarled.
    “We - glurk - saved you!” He was coughing and sputtering. My grip wasn’t that strong. He ought to still be able to breathe. Or was it? I felt strange. I’d crossed the room faster than I thought should have been possible, too, but figured it was just adrenaline.
    “It felt more like you were trying to kill me,” I said. I relaxed my grip just a little, letting him suck in a gasping breath.
    “The pain was from the nanites taking root in your system,” he said, carefully keeping his hands where I could see them. I could feel the waves of fear coming off of him. “And from their beginning to repair your spine, and other broken bones.”
    “Shit,” I said. “My back was broken?”
    He nodded. “And your spinal cord severed. And extensive internal damage.”
    I released him. “How am I walking, then?”
    From the sounds of it, my recovery was utterly impossible. No tech I’d ever heard of could fix someone that way.
    “I’m surprised by the success myself,” he replied. “I had hopes the nanites might at least stabilize you, and perhaps in time help your body heal itself. But instead they’ve reacted as if you were a Cymtarran. I’ve been studying why ever since I saw the rapidity of your healing.”
    “And?” What I really wanted to know was what this all meant for me. I knew what nanites were, at least in theory. Humans had been trying to make medical nanites a reality without much success for about a century now. Clearly the Cymtarrans had worked out all the bugs. Were there little things crawling around inside me still? The thought made me itch.
    “I decided to run a comparison of the genomes, since the most obvious reason the nanites